Once
those articulate Florida high school students, God love them, are finished
exposing the craven emptiness of politicians like Marco Rubio and others subverted
by the NRA, they might want to turn to nuclear weapons as another sacred cow
ripe for the “we call B.S.” treatment.
The
acute dangers of gun violence and nuclear weapons offer ominous parallels. Both
are deadly serious issues that provoke absurd levels of avoidance and paralysis.
For
22 years, pressure from the NRA upon the Center for Disease Control caused Congress
to defund research into gun fatalities. Opportunists like Rubio duck and take
cover from the obvious root cause of our endless mass shootings, the glut of unregulated
guns, turning to any other explanation no matter how implausible, in order to
avoid shutting off the spigot of blood-soaked NRA cash.
The
solutions to keeping children in schools safe from mass shootings have never
been hidden. There is a slam-dunk correlation between the numbers of guns in
any country and the number of mass shootings, and the United States wins the
booby prize for having by far the most guns and the most shootings.
Avoidance
continues rampant on the nuclear issue as well. Last fall Senator Corker, acknowledging
bipartisan concerns about the unstable temperament of the president, opened a meeting
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examining some of the legal issues of
nuclear command and control, by remarking that this was the first hearing on
the subject since 1976! Senator Rubio was there, tut-tutting that even talking
about whether military personnel had the option to refuse to carry out illegal
orders (they do) might undermine our credibility with North Korea.
While
the president’s unhinged bellicosity may indeed keep us up at night, the overall
structure of executive authority over nuclear weapons is an even greater cause
for sweaty insomnia than any particular person in office. No human being,
however well-trained in sober decision-making, should ever be put in the
position of having five minutes to decide whether to launch a fleet of nuclear-winter-causing
missiles because someone else’s nuclear-winter-causing missiles were already on
their way—or not, as in the case of the Hawaiian false alarm.
Those
who call for arming teachers, who buy into deterrence theory on either the gun
level or the nuclear level, must justify the improbable notion that the more we
are armed, the more we can move into the future without errors,
misinterpretations, and accidents. Nuclear deterrence, designed to ensure
stability, is undercut by the inherently unstable momentum of “we build-they
build.” In order to be certain that the weapons,
whether a loaded pistol in the drawer or a ballistic missile in a silo, are
never used, they must be kept ready for instant use—accidents waiting to happen.
Fortunately,
the insane levels of destructiveness built up during the Cold War were reduced
by the hard work of skilled diplomats—reminding us that sensible further
reductions in nuclear arms remain within the realm of possibility even if
political will is presently lacking.
Reductions
in the equally grotesque numbers of guns in the possession of American citizens
are equally possible with well-structured buyback programs and common-sense
regulations based upon the model of licensing citizens to drive cars.
Duck
and cover stopgaps only fuel vain illusions of survivability—crouching in
closets or hiding under desks as a viable protection from either a shooter with
an AR-15 or the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Prevention is not nine-tenths
but ten-tenths of the cure.
The
rhythmic repetition of shootings tempts us to assume that the probability of
nuclear war is much less likely than further gun slaughter. The reality is that
without a fundamental change of direction, both more mass shootings and more nuclear
weapons used against people are tragically inevitable. Too many assault rifles
in the hands of too many angry, alienated young men will yield more incidents. The
authority to launch nuclear weapons from North Korea is itself in the hands of
an alienated young man, leaving aside that our president is himself a far cry
from being a grown-up.
Powerful
lobbying efforts thwart reasonable plans for reducing either guns or nuclear
weapons. In the case of the latter, a vast program of renewal costing trillions
is getting under way, in clear violation of the spirit of the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty to which the U.S. is a signatory.
The
argument that the more we are armed to the teeth the safer we will be simply
does not hold up under statistical examination. Where gun regulations are
stricter, violent incidents drop, and where they are looser, incidents rise.
Period. There is no logical reason to assume matters are any different with
nuclear weapons. The more there are, and the more people who are handling them,
the greater the chance of their being used. Period.
That is why 122
nations signed an agreement at the U.N. last year banning nuclear weapons. In a
similar spirit the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School quickly
sublimated their grief and rage into a growing political movement to change gun
laws. When they become adults and begin to run for office, it’s hopeful to
imagine they will also call B.S. on the notion that more nuclear weapons make
us safer.
